okay, i’m gonna talk about my own experiences for a second. this is not meant to invalidate the experiences of others, just to provide an alternate perspective. we have seen ample stories of asexual, demisexual, or graysexual people describing the alienation and otherness they felt during school and from their peers for not being sexual “enough”— what i want to discuss is how i felt those things as a hypersexual person, for being too sexual.
i was raised in the deep south of the usa, the “bible belt”, attending a private catholic school from ages 4-14. for most of my life i went to church twice a week. our self-expression was severely limited, and i got detentions constantly for wearing socks that were too short. the uniforms were very strict, and the bodies of little girls were treated like dangerous distractions. no shoulders, knees, or ankles could be visible, and no makeup or nail polish was allowed. one of the middle school teachers always said that no student needed to look like a prostitute. our “sex ed” was an animated movie from the 90’s where the moral of the story was, literally, i kid you not, “don’t have sex before marriage or you might die”. the messages i absorbed in my youth were that being sexual was unacceptable and that sex was something that should only happen between two married adult heterosexuals behind closed and locked doors. and, hell, my parents went through a divorce, so i didn’t even have any representation of healthy relationships let alone healthy sexuality. when i was 13 and had an orgasm for the first time after masturbating, i thought something terrible was happening to my body. i thought the reason i clenched my legs together was because i “wasn’t supposed to be doing it yet” (i hadn’t started my period). i believed for a long time that what i was doing was wrong and unnatural and that i was being punished, somehow, for doing it.
in high school i started dating for the first time. my friends and my parents disapproved. he was nerdy and not conventionally attractive. no one in my entire group of girl friends was dating or even really interested in dating. if they talked about boys, it was about rejecting them. when one of them actually did start seeing boys, she didn’t talk about it. probably for the same reasons i never talked about my boyfriend— those things were “private”, and we felt judged for not being “focused on school”. when i started sexually experimenting with my boyfriend, i told no one. we both lied to everyone about what we were up to. we both felt like, or in some senses knew, that what we were doing wasn’t acceptable. that it was wrong.
i can’t even get too into how me being trans and gay factored into this or i’ll be here all day. gay sex was a one-way ticket to eternal hellfire, and trans people were delusional sex offenders. gay men were dirty and perverted, and their PDA was not safe for children. if a trans person did exist, they certainly weren’t having any sex. a trans person could never be sexually desirable or attractive in any way. in fact, it’s hilarious that someone could be attracted to a trans person— obviously the only way that could happen is if the trans person was deceitful and tricked someone into thinking they were hot. LGBT was synonymous with corruption and damnation. do you see where i’m going with this?
i cannot stress enough the cultural undertone of “sluts are bad”. the guilt and shame that i felt for being horny, something very normal and natural, horribly affected my self esteem. my sexuality developed in strange ways because i had virtually no sex ed whatsoever, but was curious and had little parental supervision on the internet. i genuinely thought there was something wrong with me. i wondered if i had repressed memories of being sexually assaulted, or if i had some sort of sexual mental illness. i felt “broken”, or “alien”, or “wrong”. and i have spent the entire rest of my life unlearning those messages and healing my relationship with my own sexuality. it took me a long time to truly forgive myself for having feelings that were normal. to fully understand that i was not a morally bad person just because i wanted to sleep with people i wasn’t married to.
all of this is just to say that feeling “broken” is not something unique to asexuals or people on the “aspec”. of course i have sympathy for those who grew up feeling pressured to be sexual! i’m just saying that isn’t a universal experience, and it hurts to have my experiences be conveniently erased for the sake of making a point about “aphobia”. we did not all have classmates who bragged about the sex they were having, we did not all have parents who pressured us into dating, we did not all hear that “sex is important to your health”. acting as if everyone around the world was raised in the same environment as you is naive and self-centered. i once again stress that this is not directed towards aces simply speaking about their experiences, but rather towards aces/demis who frame their experiences as wholly unique and uniform. those who tell me that i can’t possibly know what it’s like to feel like you are different from everyone else, or that your body/brain is wrong. people who INSIST that the default/majority environment is one where sexuality is celebrated and a lack of sexuality is punished. plenty of us have suffered under purity culture! we do not have allosexual privilege! the feelings you had were real, but the world is bigger than you and your life.
